Hockey’s Hellish Summer

As of the beginning of this week, the National Hockey League was having a fraught and mournful summer. In May, Derek Boogaard, a hulking forward on the New York Rangers, accidentally overdosed on painkillers and alcohol. On August 15th, Rick Rypien, a young player on the Vancouver Canucks, committed suicide, after a ten-year battle with depression. Last week, the veteran Wade Belak hanged himself. All three were fighters—so-called goons, whose employment in the big league was contingent on their willingness to drop the gloves to defend their teammates (and/or to put on a show).

Three makes a trend, and so hockey people began to consider whether something in these players’ line of work—Concussions? Stress? Self-loathing?—might be to blame for their premature and self-inflicted ends. Even regular sports fans, who don’t often pay hockey much mind, took note, and a new round of speculation sprang up that fighting might not be merely uncivilized, as a spectacle, but also unduly deleterious to the physical and mental health of the combatants, no matter how willing they are said to be. Hockey fighting is harder on the fighters—on both body and soul—than most fans understand. A lot of fighters don’t like to talk about it, and, even if they did, the hockey culture, with its old logging-camp tough-guy ethos, doesn’t encourage them to. Better to suffer in silence.

Ian Laperrière, as tough a player as there is—he sat out last year with a concussion after blocking a shot with his face the previous year—said on the radio last week, addressing the deaths of his peers, that the N.H.L. has a problem with painkillers. He reckoned that on each team he’s been on, typically four or five players have been hooked on them. Other players backed him up. The drug talk added an ominous bass line to persisting consternation over brain safety. Sidney Crosby, the best player in the game, gave a press conference today to say that even nine months after getting a concussion, he is still far from ready to come back and play in a live game. The knock on hockey—the most unshakable one, anyway—has always been that it is barbarous. The summer’s developments have done little to dispel this perception.

But then there was the news this morning that a plane chartered by Lokomotiv, an élite Russian hockey team, had crashed, killing all but two of the passengers aboard. Among the dead were a number of esteemed N.H.L. veterans, among them Pavol Demitra, Alexander Karpovstev, Karlis Skrastins, and Ruslan Salei, whom I have watched with admiration and wonder for many years. Their new head coach was Brad McCrimmon, who played eighteen years as a defenseman in the N.H.L. His sturdiness earned him the nickname “the Beast.” He was a stalwart on the wonderful Flyers teams of the mid-eighties, which makes me remember him, in the confused attics of my mind, as a kind of distant but beloved relative. Thinking about him now, and about the number of dead young men—not so much of the lost talent and promise as of the dozens of mothers’ sons—makes me very sad. Hockey’s summer had turned hellish—this time, at least, through no fault of its own.

Photograph by Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images.

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.